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‘Smash’ Season 2 Debuts To All Time Ratings Low

The second season of Smash promised a whole new look and an even better season from the failed first. While there were some improvements to Smash, despite Josh Safran signing on board to drive the show, and a whole new slew of writers brought in, the show didn’t seem to catch on to viewers.

Last night the show debuted to its lowest ratings ever on NBC. According to Deadline, “The two-hour premiere was down 71% from its Season 1 debut on February 6, 2012. That premiere got a 3.8/10 among adults 18-49.” It might be because the pilot was streamed three weeks in advance, which may have hurt their live viewership, seeing as their core demographic is the Internet generation.

This comes after a major layoff at the end of season one, that not only saw supporting actors exit the series, but the show runner as well. According to Kate Authur of BuzzFeed this comes after show runner Theresa Rebeck was fired because her vision turned out to be laughable, and didn’t jive with the studio heads as planned.

The show promised to be younger, fresher, and with musical numbers that seemed more in line with the material on the screen, and for the better part all of that was there. It was just missing the numbers to back up the fresh turn.

The ratings for the season premiere weren’t just down slightly, they were pretty abysmal in comparison to last year’s premiere, which had The Voice lead in, and Super Bowl promotion, which proved to work in its favor in the beginning. The pilot from last year brought in 11.4 million viewers.